A faction led by Adams managed to get McKee voted off the Army Council in 1977, effectively forcing him out of the leadership of the organisation.
Against the wishes of the IRA Army Council, on 27 October 1980, Hughes along with six other republican prisoners, including Tom McFeely, John Nixon, Sean McKenna, Tommy McKearney and Raymond McCartney, refused food and started a hunger strike.
The Independent Monitoring Commission declared in 2008 that the council was "no longer operational or functional".
Ivor Malachy Bell is an Irish republican, and a former volunteer in the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who later became Chief of Staff on the Army Council.
In July 2005, he appeared on a DVD reading out a statement from the IRA Army Council announcing the end to its armed campaign.
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In February 2005, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Michael McDowell, using parliamentary privilege, named Ferris, as well as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, as members of the IRA Army Council, an allegation that has been denied by Ferris and the Sinn Féin leadership.
He has had a house in County Donegal for many years, and a close personal friend is Pat Doherty, whom from 1988 until 2009 was vice president of Sinn Fein, and who has been publicly named as a former member of the IRA Army Council.